Talk:Philip Pilkington

Notability

Although Pilkington is a published author, it's not clear how notable he is regarding economic theory. Publishing a book and writing articles about economics does not in itself create notability. It's also significant that thsi article links to very few other articles on Wikipedia. I've tried editing this article down to more proportional size to his influence (and adding the notability template), but User:O5o7 disagrees with me, but has twice reverted my good faith edits and not followed Wikipedia:CIV. I'll revert back.Seaweed (talk) 10:16, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

I do not understand the category that User:Seaweed is using. I edit articles mainly to include technical arguments that readers may find interesting. 'Notability' is a highly subjective concept. Why is my edit of Nicholas Kaldor's article fine but my edit of Pilkington's article not? On what basis do we saw Pilkington is less notable than Kaldor? It is not clear to me either that User:Seaweed is qualified to assess notability in the field of economics because he does not appear to have expertise in the subject matter. For example, he does not appear to have checked to see if there are articles written about Pilkington's work by other economists. Searching around Google I find at least two. Here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329998798_Philip_Pilkington_unwittingly_a_Latin_American_structuralist And here: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/02/the-reformation-in-economics-back-to-the-future/ So, I put the question to User:Seaweed: how do you define notability? And if other economists are writing about Pilkington's work then why do you try to prevent Wikipedia users from exploring this work? More information is better than less information. It is hard work writing technical summaries of economic work. Deleting it based on vague subjective assessments by a non-expert in the field seems very off to me. 0507 — Preceding unsigned comment added by O5o7 (talk • contribs) 11:23, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

(Just a few tips on comments on talk pages. You can start each comment with a ":" which will indent the comment to aid reading. Also you should sign off each comment by typing "~~~~"(four tildes) at the end. The system will replace those characters with your username and timestamp).

I can see you've edited a lot in Wikipedia, but I'm not sure how much you've read about the policies that help us build this encyclopedia. So at the risk of telling you something you already know, take a look at fundamental principles of Wikipedia listed as the "Five pillars". Anyone can edit wikipedia and you don't need special expertise to write articles. Indivudual editors don't decide on notability as such, but reach conclusions through consensus. There is a guideline on general notability which is worth a read. Regarding this article about Philip Pilkington, there is an even more useful guideline on notability for academics, which I must admit I didn't know existed until a few minutes ago. All editors have a certain style and bias. I'm strongly inclined towards verifiability and usually spend most of my time adding references. I'm also biased towards helping the casual reader of Wikipedia. I try and think about an average person persuing Wikipedia with a view for a general insight into a topic rather than exhaustive completeness. I think that is the main purpose of an encyclopedia. That is also the main reason why I thought there was too much detail in this biographical article. There should be some recognition of the relative importance of a person to their field. For example, I just took a quick comparison between the economists John Maynard Keynes and Austin Robinson. The difference in detail is an example of the relative weight of importance and therefore notability. You clearly have a great deal of knowledge and insight into Philip Pilkington. I suppose maybe the challenge that would provide the most help to Wikipedia and its readers would be to distill Pilkington's ideas into concise, encyclopedic language. I hope all that's helpful. I'm just an ordinary person who enjoys editing Wikipedia without any particular goals as such. Seaweed (talk) 20:22, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

A few problems. For one, Pilkington is not an academic as noted in the article. Austin Robinson did no technical work of note. He is best known as being the husband of Joan Robinson. Why not look up the article on Luigi Pasinetti which I modelled my Kaldor and Pilkington articles on? Pasinetti is relatively obscure outside of heterodox circles. Yet his work is interesting and important so people who are enthusiastic have put a good deal of effort into outlining them on Wikipedia. When I was doing thesis work I found this page enormously helpful and so decided to try to do it for other economists whose theories can be laid out in brief notation and which might interest others. Perhaps Wikipedia is not the forum for this. In which case, that is unfortunate as the wesbite is simply blocking the spread of useful information. But if that is the case, then I would suggest there are a lot more economics pages on here to chop to pieces. I would be happy to provide references if you would like to do this. Otherwise, I would ask who exactly this dispute goes to in order to decide the relative merits of the case. O5o7 (talk) 21:23, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

Philip Pilkington should not be understood as an academic economist but as a right-wing intellectual with some degree of influence in the development of American Conservative theories of political economy among a specific subset of anti-libertarian Republicans. As far as how central Pilkington is to that movement is hard to say. He's certainly a voice out there but it's hard to draw a direct link between Pilkington and any major political figure but J.D Vance unlike say Oren Cass who is clearly influential among reformist Republicans its hard to directly see the link between Pilkington's theories and policy making. There's I think a fairly pronounced radical bias in Wiki articles on political theory which is to say that less influential "extreme" thinkers on the far-right or marxist left are vastly over-represented vs their influence on the development of policy whereas more bland non-academic theorists like Pilkington tend to be under-represented but I don't think I could make a good call on Pilkington's notability in 2024 without doing a more through investigation although if the Reformist faction wins in the party his influence would probably be notable enough to warrant an article. 9876andoP (talk) 22:38, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

Alleged conflict of interest

You wrote a lot of this yourself, didn't you Philip? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Donn300 (talk • contribs) 09:26, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Right. This article needs to be set up for speedy deletion. HetmanWL (talk) 20:24, 31 December 2023 (UTC)